Review: The Weeknd Tiptoes Toward Intimacy, Then Retreats

NEWARK — The Weeknd would be the first to say he’s not prime boyfriend material. That’s how he started his concert on Wednesday at the Prudential Center in Newark: with “Real Life,” which advises, “This boy wasn’t meant for lovin’/Tell ’em this heart doesn’t stay.”

His candor didn’t fend off loud squeals of affection and happy singalongs as the Weeknd — the Canadian songwriter Abel Tesfaye — continued through bleak songs about jaded promiscuity, decadent fame and endless rounds of self-numbing through drugs and drink. His voice is a sweet high-tenor croon, right in Michael Jackson’s range, while his songs — most of them slow, mournful and monumental — painstakingly explain how that sweetness is mostly a lie.

The Weeknd is a full-fledged pop star now. His current album, “Beauty Behind the Madness,” teamed him up with expert Top 10 producers and tempered the hypnotic, obsessive, sometimes murky tracks of his previous albums with pop succinctness and extra hooks. The album went to No. 1, and “The Madness” fall tour continues to New York City next week.

The Weeknd’s music thrives at arena scale, with its seismic bass undertow and a pace that lets every phrase sink in. A three-man band shifted some of his arrangements from their electronic studio versions toward the muscularity of live instruments, demonstrating how neatly the Weeknd has bridged the heft of hip-hop and the pomp of rock anthems. But the Weeknd is a magnificently perverse inversion of the R&B showmen and arena-rockers he has learned from.

He doesn’t play the hero or the heartthrob; he’s mired in his own damage. In “The Hills,” the closing song of the set, he insisted that “the real me” is when he’s messed up. (He uses stronger language.) Even when he’s boasting about his sexual skills in songs like “Often,” the liaisons sound more like compulsion than pleasure.

Onstage, where pop stars usually present themselves as idealized flesh and blood, the Weeknd more often performed as a remote figure in near darkness, far from his band and as much a media creation as a human character. At first he was caged in a grid that doubled as a video screen, surrounded by digital animations that perfectly framed him for the cameras feeding screens overhead.

But with his move toward pop, the Weeknd is making himself just a little more approachable. Some songs on “Beauty Behind the Madness” allow for some very guarded offers of affection. And when he got to them, he revisited old-school R&B.

Midway through the show, he was down at stage level, working up to the vocal flourishes of a soul man and singing “Earned It (50 Shades of Grey)” over a solo piano (with thousands of fans singing along), promising “I’m-a care for you.” Eventually, though, he went back to his digital milieu, back to numbness and isolation — darker, now, because he had let down some defenses. Or had he?

The Weeknd performs in Connecticut on Saturday and Washington on Sunday. He has shows at Madison Square Garden on Monday and Barclays Center on Wednesday and Thursday; theweeknd.com/tour.